


oh lord, i've been waiting for you

by xphantomhive



Series: puzzle pieces that don't quite fit together [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alcoholism, Angst As Heck, Cancer, F/F, Post-Scratch, Some Fluff, angst littered with fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-06
Updated: 2017-03-06
Packaged: 2018-09-30 01:43:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10150373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xphantomhive/pseuds/xphantomhive
Summary: An alcoholic woman who was never cut out to be a mother falls in love with makeup saleswoman Jane Crocker, and loses her, a fate she is always doomed to.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [maddy who may or may not have an ao3 account it's a mystery](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=maddy+who+may+or+may+not+have+an+ao3+account+it%27s+a+mystery).



> this is for my friend maddy but i don't know if she has a fucking ao3
> 
> title from "show me what i'm looking for" by carolina liar, which i listened to the entire time i wrote this. it's a seriously powerful song, bro.

“ _God_ Rosey, would ya’ _please_ quit crying?” you beg your infant daughter, who most certainly cannot understand what you’re asking of her, seeing as she just continues to cry. “I’ve tried everything with you. Changed, rocked, fed, burped. It ain’t working! What’s got your diaper in a twist, baby girl? Mama can fix it, c’mon, just stop crying!”

You aren’t cut out to be a mother, which you already knew, but when you found a baby on your doorstep you couldn’t bring yourself to take her to a fire station or put her up for adoption. Not with that blonde hair and those violet eyes, that scarily scrutinizing gaze, even though she can’t be any more than two months old. Your phone rings while you’re walking her around your mansion for the fifth time in the past thirty minutes, throwing her in the air, telling her how much you love her, begging her to stop crying, anything you can do to shut her _up._ And you feel so bad saying it, but _god_ , how isn’t she hoarse by now?

You pick the phone up from the receiver with a frantic, “Yeah, whaddya want, I’m busy busy busy tryin’ to get a baby to stop sobbing everywhere,” and the person on the other end chuckles.

“My apologies,” she says, and you seize up, because you could swear you’ve heard her voice before but you can’t quite place where. “I was calling to sell you cosmetics, honestly. I’m dealing with a bundle of joy myself, but he’s my grandson.”

This is a telemarketer. You think about that for a second before completely forgetting it, quickly gushing to the saleswoman who you think you know or knew or something about the baby on your doorstep that you couldn’t bare to give up but now she’s a horrorterror (something your mom used to mention, when she wasn’t drunk—she said that you were a horrorterror as a baby, so you just kinda picked up on it) and you regret your decision. The woman takes what you’re saying in stride, even though you’re sure she has a job to do.

“I’m sure you’ve tried it all,” she says, and you breathe a soft, “yes,” in return. “Wrap her in a blanket and rock in a chair rather than rocking her in your arms. It always worked with my son, though it never seems to with my grandson—he’s a restless spirit, I suppose.”

You beg her to stay on the line while you search for a blanket, and she agrees, thankfully. You wrap the baby up in a pastel pink blanket from when you were a kid and sit on the rocking chair you have stored in your attic that is also from when you were a kid, and you start rocking, right there in the dark attic with one sole window that barely lets any sunlight in. To your surprise and delight, Rose quiets down, and her eyes begin to droop. “It’s working,” you say in a hushed tone, not ready to deal with the screaming again. “You’re a lifesaver. What’s your name?”

You picture the woman smiling. You picture her with short black hair and shiny blue eyes, round glasses with a stunning smile and buckteeth. “Jane Crocker,” she responds. “Before you ask, yes, my mother is Betty Crocker. And you are?”

“Roxy Lalonde.”

She gives a soft “hmm” in response. “I could swear I’ve heard that name before.”

;;

Eventually, Jane Crocker does end up selling you makeup. She tells you she’ll deliver it herself even though that’s supposed to be left to the deliverers, but she’d really like to meet you, which makes your face heat up like you’re a teenager with a schoolgirl crush. She knocks on your door in the late afternoon of a Thursday. Rose is down for her nap, sleeping peacefully, all because of a makeup saleswoman’s advice. When you open the door for her, your breath catches. She’s breathtaking, but older than you would’ve thought. Well. She does have a grandson, after all.

She’s in her late fifties, you would guess. She has laugh lines and crow's feet, but her eyes are a vibrant blue. Her hair is mostly gray, but you can catch some tinges of black in it. She’s wearing an immaculate white dress and she has one of those nerdy chains on her glasses. “Hello, Miss.Lalonde,” she greets kindly, and you wave her off and tell her to call you Roxy, welcome her into your house with a wide outstretched arm. She smiles politely and steps inside. “I’m Jane Crocker, in case you couldn’t tell.”

“Well, I don’t go ‘round lettin’ strangers into my house,” you reply, laughing nervously and scratching the back of your neck. “Um, you can sit.”

“You have an accent,” she says, absolutely awestruck, like she wasn’t expecting it. “Are you originally from Texas?”

You nod the affirmative, and she makes that “hmm” sound again, taking a seat on your overpriced couch that you love. You offer her a glass of wine. She shoots it down and tells you that she’s too old to drink, then hands you the paper bag she has in her hand. You accept it and set it on the coffee table, leaving for a split second to pour yourself a glass of wine. You’re most likely going to drink yourself into a stupor, despite having a baby now. “Are you fond of alcohol?” Jane asks carefully, and that is literally the most polite way you’ve ever heard anyone ask someone if they were an alcoholic.

“I s’ppose,” you give back, taking a swig of your wine right from the bottle. “That ain’t bad, is it?”

She shrugs. “It is with a child, I’d say, but to each his own.”

You ask her if she’ll stay a while. She tells you that she’s quite busy, but that she’ll stay for a while, anyway. You’ve downed most of the wine and you finally work up the courage to ask her on a date, and she smiles, accepts. You’re over the moon.

;;

You go on exactly one date with Jane Crocker, and then she’s suddenly out of your life, like she never even existed to you in the first place. The next time you see her, Rose is thirteen years old and you can’t understand a damn thing she says. She’s always got her nose in a book, which is more often than not a spellbook, and you call her your horrorterror. She always smiles at you when you say it, but you know that it’s fake. It always is. Rose isn’t your biggest fan.

Jane has got to be pushing seventy when you run into her, in a grocery store three miles away from your house that you rarely ever go shopping at. She has a boy around Rose’s age attached to her hip, with buckteeth like her own and vibrant blue eyes that are a few shades darker than her own. His hair is black and he has huge-framed glasses. He hides behind Jane like a scared little boy. “Roxy! Hello,” she says, bright and happy as ever. “This is my grandson, John. John, say hello to Roxy Lalonde and her daughter, Rose.”

He waves. “My apologies, he’s got a few issues with anxiety,” she gushes, and you shrug it off, tell her that you almost wish Rose were as quiet as him. She glares. Day by day you make her hate you even more, and you wish you could reverse the clock, but life doesn’t give you second chances, you suppose. “How’ve you been? Rose is so grown up. Hello, Rose.”

She nods back, says, “Jane Crocker,” with a light tone, immediately going back to her Grimoire that you bought her for her thirteenth birthday. Not your brightest idea, but you digress. She was turning into a little witch of black magic with help from the internet, anyway.

John is looking at Rose like he knows her, the same way you look at Jane. “How ‘bout we go on a date again before you’re too old to stand? ‘S been much too long.”

“Thirteen years,” she says, wistfully. “Though that was mainly an insult, I accept. Tomorrow at seven work for you?”

You nod, but the itch you’ve had for years still isn’t scratched. You think there’s something about Jane Crocker you’re forgetting, but you don’t know what.

;;

This time around, you manage to have two dates with Jane before she falls ill with something the doctors still haven’t figured out, but she doesn’t disappear on you, this time. She keeps you in the loop. You meet her son, a kind middle-aged man who radiates warmth, just like her. John is the same way. You get to know her and her extended family as her illness (skin cancer, they discover) takes over, from her son to her grandson to her grandson’s boyfriend, who John clings to like every day is the last they’ll have together. You and John are the only two who stay with her twenty-four seven. His dad takes him out of school for the timebeing and stays with Rosey at their house. You always worry about how she’s treating Mr.Egbert—you’d hope better than you.

“Hey, Miss.Lalonde, do you ever have this deja vu thing?” he asks one night, while Jane is sleeping peacefully in her hospital bed and you’re reading the newest copy of _People_ magazine to try and block out the steady beeping of all of the machines she’s hooked up to. You look up at him. He’s looking down at his slowly-dying grandmother who you think you may be in love with, who you kiss every day when she wakes up and every night before she goes to sleep, because you’re determined to get everything out of the days you have left with her. “Like, like if you had an extra limb or something. Like you remember something but not really. You know what I mean?”

You close your magazine and set it aside, for now. “Afraid I do, kiddo,” you respond, reaching out to grab Jane’s hand, rubbing her palm with your thumb.

“It hurts.”

You breathe a sigh. “Yeah.”

“I’m afraid Dave is going to die again. I mean, like. I know we played this crazy weird game and he died a lot. He was the Knight of Time and I was the Heir of Breath and Rose was the Seer of Light and there’s this other girl, Jade, who I’ve never met but I know she was the Witch of Space. They were my best friends. They still are. But I’m the only one who remembers and I’m scared that Dave will die again and it hurts more every time, you know?” he blurts, all in one breath. Then he draws himself back like you slapped him.

“Yeah,” you breathe, again. “I played the game too. I got the reset, like you. Only my session was doomed. I didn’t know Jane would be so much...older, than me.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, and you can tell that he means it. “I get how you feel.”

And though he’s only thirteen, you’re sure he really does.

;;

Jane Crocker dies on the crisp spring morning of April, 1999. She is seventy-five years old (even older than you thought, wow) and her skin cancer had apparently been gradually spreading to her heart. No one noticed. They never could’ve stopped it in time, anyway. John Egbert, her grandson and the heir to her fortune, cries and screams and throws a fit like a toddler when they take her off of the life support machine, yelling obscenities at the doctors and nurses who hold him back. You want to throw a fit, too, but all you can really do is cry quietly to yourself.

Your daughter, who you really thought hated you, rubs your arm in a comforting manner, and though it is stiff and not filled with much emotion, she says, “It’ll be okay, mom.”

It won’t, but you appreciate the sentiment.

;;

They bury Jane in an extravagant red dress that brings all of her life back. You can picture her in the dress in your mind, somewhere in the future or maybe the past, waiting for you outside of a house in a universe that doesn’t exist anymore where you once lived with your own drunken mother, smiling her bright smile with her buckteeth and her glasses and her blue eyes. And you are younger, with blonde hair that isn’t going gray at the ends and a big smile on your face, and you pull her into a hug and kiss her and tell her how much you love her.

John sits across from you at the funeral, next to his boyfriend, Dave Strider. They are holding hands and John is crying into his shoulder, onto an impeccable suit that Dave barely notices—or cares, maybe—that is getting covered in salty tears. He soothes his thumb in slow circles around the back of John’s hand. You watch them and some of the weight on your chest lifts, just a bit.

**Author's Note:**

> i hope you enjoyed??? my writing is shit but i try hard as heck.
> 
> thanks for reading !!! <3


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